The Communist Party keeps Thatcher in office (continued)

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providing the whole claim was settled there and then. This was impossible and the talks broke down.

On Thursday a further meeting' took place at the request of Terry Duffy, this time with Edwardes and the General Secretaries of various unions.

This included not only people like Duffy but leaders of the staff unions, who have nothing to do with the claim! Roy Grantham of APEX was there. Clive Jenkins was therewhose foremen members had been intimidating • manual workers into accepting the David Basnett was there from the GMWU: this union had a total of 25 members in BLall of whom are at MGs Abingdon and shortly to get the sack as the plant closes..

Alex Kitson attended for the TGWU in the absence of Moss Evans who was on holiday.

He arrived late and announced he had been at à meeting of the TGWU Executive who had decided to make the impending strike official.

This cut very little ice with the General Secretaries who quickly decided after a meeting with Edwardes to call for the strike call to be dropped on no other basis than their "commitment" to BL and a few more fruitless negotiations on bonus which would take place on Monday and Tuesday of the following week.

This was agreed unanimously, including Kitson-despite his "official support".

They then approached the JNC who had been assembled in a basement waiting for the call.

They agreed unanimously to back the sell-out.

The following day an emergency meeting of convenors was called which also backed the sell-out with a 2-1 majority. Instructions were sent out calling off the strike.

On Monday morning there was a joint meeting of shop stewards the Cowley Assembly Plant.

The convenors reported the events of the previous week and it became clear that Bob Fryer had not fought the self-out and had been a party to the negotiations on bonus.

There was a very sharp reaction from the meeting. The 200 plant stewards voted unanimously to condemn the JNC and the convenors' conference.

They called for a new, democratic structure based on a delegate conterence, which they had been fighting for since the summer.

The bonus negotiations predictably produced nothing.

Fryer fought for a new strike decision on the basis of his mandate from the plant. The JNC however voted 14-12 in favour of recommending the "final" offer of 6.8% plus £1.25 per week bonus for twelve weeks to the convenors the next day.

Silenced

At the convenors conference Fryer was silenced. Hawley ruled that no JNC member be allowed to speak! • The vote by convenors that the offer be accepted was overwhelming-but they argued that it would be recommended to a further series of mass meetingsthis time over the span of a few days.

Again they got a shock.

Although some of the right wing-who could guarantee anti-strike votes-held meetings quickly in order to influence the decisions, when Cowley met the vote for a strike was even stronger.

At the Assembly Plant the stewards had recommended both a strike vote and the call for a new democratic negotiating structure. They got massive backing.

Even at the right wing-led Cowley - Body Plant where convénor Bill Roche struggled to demoralise the workforce into acceptance, the vote was a solid 10-1 for strike action.

As mass meetings took place many plants followed their previous pattern of voting with something of a swing against strike action.

Longbridge vote

By Friday it was clear that held back until Tuesday morning.

If Longbridge repeated its previous big majority for strike action-then the vote throughout BL would go that way.

Everything therefore hung on convenor Adams and the Communist Party.

The sell-out came when the CP-led Longbridge works committee decided to accept the This was taken to a full stewards meeting. There Adams' sell out proposal was decisively lost.

•The stewards voted 180-140 for strike action.

But this was not allowed to stand in the way of Adams' determined moves to knife a strike.

At the mass meeting Adams - refused to put the decision of the stewards and instead pushed the convenors conference recommendation for acceptance.

Even after he had done his best to secure a no-strike decision the vote at the meeting has been hotly disputed. Many workers who watched TV film of the meeting were convinced that the vote went in favour of strike action-with thousands of workers brushing aside Adams pleas that they would be "isolated" and defeated if they went on strike.

Adams' treachery tipped the scales in BL as a whole-producing a result claimed to be 2-1 against strike action.

This was a majority big enough to make action by an ' individual plant extremely difficult.

In the Cowley Assembly Plant a final mass meeting was held at which workers voted to step up the struggle for democracy in BL and to meet again if their proposals for reform of the bargaining procedures are not accepted.

Humiliating

Once again Edwardes has used the apparatus of the trade union bureaucracy to ratiroad through a humiliating sell-out on wages.

But this year, more openly than ever before, the union officials have had to lean for support upon the involvement of convenors-and, kéy to their whole success, upon "Communist" Jack Adams.

Thousands of Longbridge workers saw and voted against Adams' treacherous line at the final mass meeting: millions witnessed his betrayal on their TV screens.

The fight for new leadership in BL-so crucial if further sell-outs are to be avoided-means a fight not only against General Secretaries, national officials and the right wing: it means a fight against the Communist Party and its conscious opposition to mass struggle to bring down Thatcher.

The CP's "peaceful road" to socialism means in BL full-scale collaboration with Edwardes and . his Tory paymad on fence of orkers:

based on defence or workersi independent interests, can offer a way forward for BL workers. Building such a leadership is the task undertaken by the Workers Socialist League.

All those who argue that change is a slow process of gradual, peaceful transition should keep well away from the Natural History Museum in Kensington in future.

For the new exhibition entitled 'Man's place in evolution' carefully stamps on the most cherished beliefs of all those reformists who saw the theory of evolution as proof in nature of what they preached about politics and society.

Instead of a nice gradual process of slow changes as the years pass by, the exhibition challenges us to accept what all the recent evidence indicated. That changes in nature-as in society- are sudden and sharp involving major breaks with the past and massive leaps into the future. " Man did not, for example, the exhibition suggests, evolve in a nice, simple straight line from the apes.

As the handbook puts it:

"It is axiomatic, therefore, that no species in the fossil record can be considered as ancestral to any other, nor can any one species evolve directly into another."

Instead, what happened was that at certain points there were sudden breaks, major qualitiative changes leading to a new stage.

This is reflected in the revised tree of evolution' on display which has branches breaking off at sharp angles representing these sudden violent breaks into new direcColin Morrow reviews the new exhibition 'Man's Place in Evolution' at the Natural History Museum in Kensington.

tions,, the emergence of new stages.

Evolution is thus seen in practice as a process of revolutionary changes.

None of this is, of course, new to Marxists who have argued, since the publication of Engels 'Dialectics of Nature' for such a materialist understanding of nature as a process.

What is interesting is the response of the bourgeois academic world to this assault on their treasured picture of the world.

In the 1950s when 'heretics' like Immanuel Velikovsky in America attempted to argue that the history of man and the very earth itself was one of cataclysmic change not gradual evolution, the response was simply dismissive.

When Velikovsky argued that thaipto not inert and are marked by spontaneity and conflict" and went on to point out in his book Earth in Upheaval that:

"facts have presented themselves that do not square with the picture of a peaceful world • Monthly paper of the Socialist Youth League New issue available 'rice 10p plus 12p postas WOMAN WORKER A paper of the Workers Socialist League New issue now out Price 12p plus 12p postage available from WSL, Box 5277, London WC1N 3XX moulded in a slow ful process" he was ridiculed as a crank and an ignoramus.

But now that such ideas have gained an audience and are publicly counterposed to the prevailing bourgeois "truth" the politics behind the objections comes out.

Thus, in a letter to Nature magazine, Dr. Vivien Halstead has argued that if the view of evolution and natural history now on display at the museum becomes accepted it will encour. age the revolutionary view of how societies change!

Bourgeois "knowledge": is, therefore, reduced to what Marxists always claimed it to be -the official ideas of the ruling class.

For Halstead and his ilk what matters is not historical fact but political continuity!

Unfortunately, as information has accumulated on evolution, on the ice ages, on geological change, on the reversals of the earth's polarity, and on the history of man's own struggle against nature, what has become abundantly clear is the contradictory nature of our world and its revolutionary past.

As Velikovsky has commented:

"The past of mankind, and of the animal and plant kingdoms, too, must now be viewed in the light of the experience of Hiroshima and no longer from the portholes of the Beagle."

Perhaps the capitalist dinosaur, alarmed enough at what was seen by Darwin from the portholes of the Beagle, now scents its own extinction. wonkin worker MOVE!

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